Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (2 page)

I stand up, close my notebook. Change the subject. “How is your block?”

“It’s fine,” says Martha. “I guess.”

“There’s an active residents association?”

“Yes.” She nods blankly, not interested in the line of questioning, not ready to contemplate how things will be for her alone.

“And let me ask, hypothetically, if there were a firearm in the home …”

“There is,” she begins. “Brett left his—”

I hold up one hand, cut her off. “Hypothetically. Would you know how to use it?”

“Yes,” she says. “I can shoot. Yes.”

I nod. Fine. All I needed to hear. Private ownership or sale of firearms is technically forbidden, although the brief wave of house-to-house searches ended months ago. Obviously I’m not going to bike over to School Street and report that Martha Cavatone has her husband’s service piece under the bed—get her sent away for the duration—but neither do I need to hear any details.

Martha murmurs “excuse me” and gets up, jerks open the pantry door and reaches for a tottering pile of cigarette cartons. But then she stops herself, slams the door, and spins around to press her fingers into her eyes. It’s almost comical, it’s such a teenage set of gestures: the impetuous grab for comfort, the immediate and disgusted self-abnegation. I remember standing in our front hallway, at seven or eight years old, just after Martha went home in the evenings, trying to catch one last sniff of cinnamon and bubblegum.

“Okay, so, Martha, what I can do is go by the restaurant,” I say—I hear myself saying—“and ask a few questions.” And as soon as the words are out she’s across the room, hugging me around the neck, grinning into my chest, like it’s a done deal, like I’ve already brought her husband home and he’s out there on the stoop, ready to come in.

“Oh, thank you,” she says. “
Thank you
, Henry.”

“Listen, wait—wait, Martha.”

I gently pry her arms from around my neck, step back and plant
her in front of me, summon the stern hardheaded spirit of my grandfather, level Martha with his severe stare. “I will do what I can to find your husband, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, breathless. “You promise?”

“Yes.” I nod. “I can’t promise that I will find him, and I definitely can’t promise that I will bring him home. But I’ll do what I can.”

“Of course,” she says, “I understand,” and she’s beaming, hugging me again, my notes of caution sliding unheard off her cheeks. I can’t help it, I’m smiling, too, Martha Milano is hugging me and I’m smiling.

“I’ll pay you, of course,” she says.

“No, you won’t.”

“No, I know, not with
money
money, but we can figure out something …”

“Martha, no. I won’t take anything from you. Let’s have a look around, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

* * *

Martha finds me a recent picture of her husband, a nice full-body snapshot from a fishing trip a couple years back. I study him, Brett Cavatone, a short man with a broad powerful frame, standing at the bank of a stream in the classic pose, holding aloft a dripping wide-mouth bass, man and fish staring into the camera with the same
skeptical and somber expression. Brett has a black beard, thick and untrimmed, but the hair on his head is neat and short, a crew cut only slightly grown out.

“Was your husband in the military, Martha?”

“No,” she says, “he was a cop. Like you. But not Concord. The state force.”

“A trooper?”

“Yes.” Martha takes the picture from me, gazes at it proudly.

“Why did he leave the force?”

“Oh, you know. Tired of it. Ready for a change. And my dad was starting this restaurant. So, I don’t know.”

She murmurs these fragments—
tired of it, ready for a change
—as if they require no further explanation, like the idea of leaving law enforcement voluntarily makes self-evident sense. I take the photograph back and slip it into my pocket, thinking of my own brief career: patrolman for fifteen months, detective on Adult Crimes for four months, forcibly retired along with my colleagues on March twenty-eighth of this year.

We walk around the house together. I’m peering into the closets, opening Brett’s drawers, finding nothing interesting, nothing remarkable: a flashlight, some paperbacks, a dozen ounces of gold. Brett’s closet and dresser drawers are still full of clothes, which in normal circumstances would suggest foul play rather than intentional abandonment, but there is no longer any such thing as normal circumstances. At lunch yesterday, McGully told us a story he heard, where the husband and wife were out for a walk in White Park, and
the woman just runs, literally runs, leaps over a hedge and disappears into the distance.

“She said, ‘Can you hold my ice cream a sec?’ ” McGully said, laughing, bellowing, pounding the table. “Poor dummy standing there with two ice creams.”

The Cavatones’ bedroom furniture is handsome and sturdy and plain. On Martha’s night table is a hot-pink journal with a small brass lock, like a child’s diary, and when I lift it I get just the lightest scent of cinnamon. Perfect. I smile. On the opposite night table, Brett’s, is a miniature chess board, pieces arranged midgame; her husband, Martha tells me with another fond smile, plays against himself. Hung above the dresser is a small tasteful painting of Christ crucified. On the wall of the bathroom, next to the mirror, is a slogan in neat all-capital block letters: I
F YOU ARE WHAT YOU SHOULD BE
,
YOU WILL SET THE WORLD ABLAZE
!

“Saint Catherine,” says Martha, appearing beside me in the mirror, tracing the words with her forefinger. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

We go back downstairs and sit facing each other on a tidy brown sofa in the living room. There’s a column of dead bolts along the front door and rows of iron bars on the windows. I flip open my notebook and gather a few more details: what time her husband left for work yesterday, what time her father came by, said “have you seen Brett?” and they realized that he was gone.

“This may seem like an obvious question,” I say, when I’m done writing down her answers. “But what do you think he might be doing?”

Martha worries at the nail of her pinky. “I’ve thought about it so much, believe me. I mean, it sounds silly, but something
good
. He wouldn’t be off bungee jumping or shooting heroin or whatever.” My mind flashes on Peter Zell, the last poor soul I went in search of, while Martha continues. “If he really left, if he’s not …”

I nod. If he’s not dead. Because that possibility, too, hovers over us. A lot of missing people are missing because they’re dead.

“He’d be doing something, like,
noble
,” Martha concludes. “Something he thought was noble.”

I smooth the edges of my mustache. Something noble. A powerful thing to think about one’s husband, especially one who’s just disappeared without explanation. A pink bead of blood has appeared at the edge of her fingernail.

“And you don’t feel it’s possible—”

“No,” says Martha. “No women. No way.” She shakes her head, adamant. “Not Brett.”

I don’t press it; I move on. She tells me that he was getting around on a black ten-speed bicycle; she tells me no, he didn’t have any regular activities outside of work and home. I ask her if there’s anything else she needs to tell me about her husband or her marriage, and she says no: He was here, they had a plan, and then he went away.

Now all that’s left is the million-dollar question. Because even if I do track him down—which I almost certainly will not be able to do—it remains the case that abandoning one’s spouse is not illegal and never has been, and of course I have no power at this point to compel anyone to do anything. I’m unsure exactly how to explain
any of this to Martha Milano, and I suspect she knows it anyway, so I just go ahead and say it:

“What do you want me to do if I find him?”

She doesn’t answer at first, but leans across the sofa and stares deeply, almost romantically, into my eyes. “Tell him he has to come home. Tell him his salvation depends on it.”

“His … salvation?”

“Will you tell him that, Henry? His salvation.”

I murmur something, I don’t know what, and look down at my notebook, vaguely embarrassed. The faith and fervency are new; they weren’t an aspect of Martha Milano when we were young. It’s not just that she loves this man and misses him; she believes that he has sinned by abandoning her and will suffer for it in the world to come. Which is coming, of course, a lot sooner than it used to be.

I tell Martha I’ll be back soon if I have any news and where she can find me, in the meantime, if she needs to.

As we stand up, her expression changes.

“Jeez, I’m sorry, I’m such a—I’m sorry. Henry, how’s your sister doing?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

I’m already at the door, I’m working my way through the series of dead bolts and chains.

“You don’t know?”

“I’ll be in touch, Martha. I’ll let you know what I can find.”

* * *

The current environment. That’s what I said to Martha:
A missing-person investigation is especially challenging in the current environment
. I sigh, now, at the pale inadequacy of the euphemism. Even now, fourteen months since the first scattered disbelieving sightings, seven months after the odds of impact rose to one hundred percent, nobody knows what to call it. “The situation,” some people say, or “what’s going on.” “This craziness.” On October third, seventy-seven days from today, the asteroid 2011GV
₁
, 6.5 kilometers in diameter, will plow into planet Earth and destroy us all.
The current environment
.

I trot briskly down the stairs of the Cavatones’ porch in the sunlight and unchain my bike from their charming cement birdbath. Their lawn is the only one mowed on the street. It’s a beautiful day today, hot but not too hot, clear blue sky, drifting white clouds. Pure uncomplicated summertime. On the street there are no cars, no sound of cars.

I snap on my helmet and take my bike slowly down the street, right on Bradley, east toward Loudon Bridge, heading in the direction of Steeplegate Mall. A police car is parked at the end of Church with an officer in the driver’s seat, a young man sitting upright in black wraparound shades. I nod hello and he nods back, slow, impassive. There’s a second cop car at Main and Pearl, this one with a driver I slightly recognize, although his wave in return to mine is cursory at best, quick and unsmiling. He’s one of the legions of inexperienced young patrol officers who swelled the ranks of the CPD in the weeks before its abrupt reorganization under the federal Department of Justice—the same reorganization that dissolved the Adult Crimes Unit
and the rest of the detective divisions. I don’t get the memos anymore, of course, but the current operating strategy appears to be one of overwhelming presence: no investigations, no neighborhood policing, just a cop on every corner, rapid response to any whiff of public disturbance, as with the recent events on Independence Day.

If I
were
still on the force, it would be General Order 44-2 that would be relevant to Martha’s case. I can call up the form in my mind, practically see it: Part I, procedures; Part VI, Unusual Circumstances. Additional investigative steps.

There’s a guy at Main and Court, dirty beard and no shirt, whirling in circles and punching the air, earbuds in place, though I’d be willing to bet there’s no music coming out of them. I raise my hand from my handlebars and the bearded man waves back then pauses, looks down, adjusting the nonexistent volume. Once I’m over the bridge I make a small detour, weave over to Quincy Street and the elementary school. I chain my bike to the fence surrounding the playing field, take off my helmet and scan the recess yard. It’s the height of summer but there’s a small army of kids hanging out here, as there has been all day, every day, playing four-square and hopscotch, chasing one another across the weeds of the soccer field, urinating against the wall of the deserted brick schoolhouse. Many spend the night here too, camping out on their beach towels and
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
bed sheets.

Micah Rose is sitting on a bench on the outskirts of the playground, his legs drawn up and hugged to his chest. He’s eight. His sister Alyssa is six, and she’s pacing back and forth in front of him. I
take the pair of eyeglasses I’ve been carrying in my coat pocket and hand them to Alyssa, who claps her hands delightedly.

“You fixed them.”

“Not me personally,” I say, eyeing Micah, who is looking stonily at the ground. “I know a guy.” I tilt my head toward the bench. “What’s wrong with my man?”

Micah looks up and scowls warningly at his sister. Alyssa looks away. She’s wearing a sleeveless jean jacket I gave her a couple weeks ago, two sizes too big, with a Social Distortion patch sewn on the back. It belonged to Nico, my own sister, many years ago.

“Come on, guys,” I say, and Alyssa glances one last time at Micah and launches in: “Some big kids from St. Alban’s were here and they were being all crazy and pushing and stuff, and they took things.”

“Shut
up
,” says Micah. Alyssa looks back and forth from him to me and almost cries, but then keeps it together. “They took Micah’s sword.”

“Sword?” I say. “Huh.”

Their father is a feckless character named Johnson Rose, whom I went to high school with, and who I happen to know went Bucket List very early on. The mother, unless I got the story wrong, subsequently overdosed on vodka and pain pills. A lot of the kids spending their days out here have similar stories. There’s one, Andy Blackstone—I see him right now, bouncing a big rubber medicine ball against the school—who was being raised, for one reason or another, by an uncle. When the odds rose to a hundred percent, the
uncle apparently just told him to get the fuck out.

A little more gentle prodding of Alyssa and Micah, and it emerges, to my relief, that what has been lost is a toy—a plastic samurai sword that once upon a time came with a ninja costume, but which Micah had been wearing at his belt for some weeks.

“Okay,” I say, squeezing Alyssa’s shoulder and turning to look at Micah in the eye. “It’s not a big deal.”